SIGN LANGUAGE EMERGENCE

All human languages, spoken and signed, are compositional: the meanings of complex expressions are determined by the meanings of their constituents and the ways in which they combine. In this project, we shift linguistic analysis beyond the traditional focus on words and their combinations, and examine the contributions of the body to the composition of communicative expressions. The project is motivated by sign languages, which are characterized by an additional type of compositionality: the compositionality of the body. While the hands convey words, individual actions of face, head, and torso are overlaid on the actions of the hands to manifest a variety of different functions of language.

Sign languages also provide clues to language emergence. Unlike spoken languages, which are all thousands of years old or descended from old languages, sign languages can be born whenever a group of deaf people has opportunity to meet and communicate. Though a small country, Israel is home to several young sign languages, offering the opportunity to observe how new human languages arise and develop complexity over time. (See map.)

A preliminary study on Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL, Sandler 2012) suggests that each generation in that young language recruits additional articulators to express new linguistic functions, and in this way the body maps the increasing complexity of the language. That study, together with over a decade of research with colleagues Mark Aronoff, Irit Meir, and Carol Padden, inform the GRAMBY project.

In the GRAMBY project, we use a range of elicitation materials to systematically map linguistic functions to actions of different parts of the body in different age groups, allowing us to trace the development of linguistic complexity in three young sign languages that originated in Israel only 80-100 years ago: Israeli Sign Language (ISL), and two sign languages that developed independently in villages: Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) and Kfar Qasem Sign Language (KQSL).